Shade Tree Wisdom - Home 8/ 27/07

There’s something about home, isn’t there? I remember topping the final hill from which one could see the Church steeple and the children getting all excited because “we’re almost to Grandma’s house!” when we were on a vacation trip to our homes.

And our own grandchildren knowing they were getting near when they started to drive on roadways surrounded by trees in The Woodlands where we live now. (“Fair are the woodlands”.) indeed.

Home is familiar. We know where things are. We know how things work, or are supposed to work, and we know how to get there from here. So home has value because it is a basic that remains the same in our minds. And that is what is the best part of it.

Because we do live in a world that seems to be changing overnight. New things spring up to amaze or delight us, or tend to confuse and cause anxiety for us who are along in years. Just the other day I learned of a device by which we will be able to call any place on earth with no help from AT&T at all. Amazing, and the cost is negligible.

And we get used to change. For such new things do make our lives easier. This computer I am using mostly as a writing instrument has capabilities that I have not even begun to explore. I simply like the fact that with a key stroke I can change a word or dress a sentence. And it’s Spell Check helps with the spelling. And I never have to use carbons to make copies or re-write a page because of a spelling error.

What troubles me is that by eagerly accepting new things we are in danger of losing the “old things’, our heritage, if you will. Many churches offer several different types of worship services. Insisting, of course, that this does not change their teaching.

Is this true? I read just this morning a think piece about absence of “holy fear”.
Our life style tends to do this. And one must ask, “where will it really end?”

Yesterday the Sermon text came from the section of Hebrews that spoke of discipline, and offers us this wisdom, “Whom the Lord love He disciplines”. And discipline simply means learning that the sinful reach of man must be curbed and changed, and allow the Holy Spirit to change us into His children. Unless this happens, we will live lives that always reach for things it ought not reach for.

As that think piece I referred to ends “Funny, how the older one gets, the ideas you once dismissed or forgot about turn out to be the most important ones of all.”

For us who believe Jesus Christ is our Savior and Redeemer, we know, simply, this truth, “Jesus Christ the same, yesterday, today, and forever.” Knowing that makes any change bearable, does it not?

GPD 8/27/07